Kind of Blue
1959
Davis handed the players sketches on the day and most of what you hear is a first take. Two sessions, and it was done.
★ 9.8
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1959
Showing 70 works across all media from 1959
Some Like it Hot
Directed by Billy Wilder
1959
American comedy has never been funnier, and the Legion of Decency was appalled: Wilder ran a single disguise for two hours without ever letting the joke thin out.
★ 9.4
So What
1959 · From Kind of Blue
Two chords and all the space in the world, Davis proving that less was the most radical idea in jazz.
★ 9.2
North by Northwest
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1959
Every spy thriller since owes it something, James Bond most of all: Hitchcock chases an innocent man across America by crop duster and over Mount Rushmore, enjoying himself throughout.
★ 9.1
What'd I SayRay Charles
What'd I Say
1959 · From What'd I Say
Twelve minutes left at a Pennsylvania dance, so Charles improvised it on his Wurlitzer and many stations banned it.
★ 9.0
Take Five
1959 · From Time Out
Morello kept soloing in five, so the quartet built him a tune in 5/4; Desmond wrote the theme.
★ 8.7
The 400 Blows
Directed by Francois Truffaut
1959 · France
The French New Wave announces itself: Truffaut put his own miserable childhood on screen at twenty-seven, and the last shot changed what an ending was allowed to do.
★ 8.6
The Tin Drum
1959 · 592 pages
Oskar decides on his third birthday to stop growing, keeps his tin drum, and screams glass to pieces while the Nazis take Danzig. Grass forced postwar Germany to look at itself through him.
★ 8.3
All Blues
1959 · From Kind of Blue
A twelve-bar blues in 6/8, take two the only complete one, and Paul Chambers' bass figure underneath everything.
★ 7.6
Mingus Ah Um
1959
Columbia refused to let him record the words to Fables of Faubus, an attack on a segregationist governor, so it appears as an instrumental.
★ 7.6
Shout (The Isley Brothers)
1959
Ronald Isley improvised the call and response onstage extending Lonely Teardrops, and RCA packed the room with friends answering.
★ 7.5
The Shape of Jazz to Come
1959
Coleman played a white plastic saxophone because it was what he could afford, and half the musicians in New York thought he was a fraud.
★ 7.4
Goodbye Pork Pie HatCharles Mingus
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
1959 · From Mingus Ah Um
Lester Young died two months before the session, and Mingus answered with a slow blues named for his hat.
★ 7.4
Time Out
1959
Every piece is in an unusual meter. Take Five is in five beats to the bar and was written by the saxophonist, Paul Desmond, not Brubeck.
★ 7.3
There Goes My Baby
1959
Strings, timpani and a Brazilian baion; Wexler reportedly dismissed the playback as a radio caught between two stations.
★ 7.3
I Only Have Eyes for You
1959
Terry Johnson dreamed the arrangement, called the group to rehearse at 4 a.m., and Goldner drowned it in reverb.
★ 7.2
Rio Bravo
Directed by Howard Hawks
1959
Hawks made it as an argument against High Noon: instead of a marshal begging for help, four flawed men hold a jail and enjoy each other's company doing it.
★ 7.0
Mack the KnifeBobby Darin
Mack the Knife
1959
Richard Wess's arrangement climbs a semitone verse after verse, and Darin rides the tension to his only number one.
★ 6.9
Children of the Alley
1959 · 448 pages
One Cairo alley holds human history entire. Its founder withdraws into a great house, and each generation raises a redeemer, Adam then Moses then Jesus then Muhammad, defeated by the same protection racket.
★ 6.9
James Joyce
1959 · 887 pages
The novelist Anthony Burgess called this the greatest literary biography of the century. Ellmann reconstructs Joyce day by day, the debts and the eye operations and the exact Dublin talk that became Ulysses.
★ 6.8
Structural Anthropology
1959 · 410 pages
Myths and marriage rules work like languages, Lévi-Strauss argues, built from unconscious oppositions. His dissection of the Oedipus myth taught Paris to treat culture itself as a code.
★ 6.7
Beyond the Sea
1959
Charles Trenet wrote it about the sea; Jack Lawrence's English lyric made it a love song, and Darin swung it.
★ 6.7
Naked Lunch
1959 · 304 pages
Addiction as the model for every kind of control: Burroughs turns junk sickness into a shrieking comic nightmare of mad doctors, police, and addicts. Massachusetts put it on trial for obscenity and lost.
★ 6.6
Arabian Sands
1959 · 400 pages
Thesiger crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter twice with Bedu companions, on a pint of water a day. He loved that life, knew oil money would end it, and wrote this as its elegy.
★ 6.5
The Last of the Just
1959 · 374 pages
From a medieval massacre of the Jews of York to Auschwitz, one family produces in each generation one of the thirty-six hidden just men whose suffering, by legend, holds up the world.
★ 6.5
Anatomy of a Murder
Directed by Otto Preminger
1959
The Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph Welch plays the judge and Duke Ellington wrote the score: a murder trial turning on an alleged rape, argued in language so frank that 1959 audiences were shocked.
★ 6.5
A Raisin in the Sun
1959 · 151 pages
Ten thousand dollars of insurance money reaches a Chicago apartment and a Black family goes to war over what it is for. Broadway had never staged a play by a Black woman before.
★ 6.4
Ben Hur
Directed by William Wyler
1959
The chariot race took months to shoot and has never been bettered: Wyler's epic runs almost four hours and earns every minute of the nine it spends inside that arena.
★ 6.3
Stagger Lee
1959
An 1895 St. Louis barroom killing, remade by Price into a number one he re-recorded clean for American Bandstand.
★ 6.1
Moanin'
1959
The pianist Bobby Timmons wrote the title tune as a joke riff the band kept asking him to finish. It answers itself like a hymn.
★ 6.0
The Armada
1959 · 443 pages
Philip II handed his invasion fleet to a duke who pleaded seasickness. Mattingly tells 1588 as a European crisis, not an English one, and the defeat he reconstructs stops the Counter-Reformation's advance.
★ 5.8
The Warriors
Reflections on Men in Battle
1959 · 242 pages
What holds men to war, Gray decided, is the spectacle, the comradeship, and a delight in destruction nobody admits to. The day his Columbia doctorate arrived, so did his draft notice.
★ 5.6
Endurance
Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
1959 · 357 pages
Antarctic pack ice crushes their ship in 1915, leaving twenty-eight men on a drifting floe. Shackleton sails an open boat eight hundred miles for help. Lansing reconstructed it all from the crew's diaries.
★ 5.6
Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair
1959 · From Nina Simone at Town Hall
Sharp and Karpeles collected this Scottish ballad in the Appalachians in 1916; Simone slows it to near-stillness at Town Hall.
★ 5.6
Sea of Love (Phil Phillips)
1959
A Lake Charles bellhop wrote it for a woman, and Khoury's tiny label carried the swooning triplets to number two.
★ 5.6
Dream Lover
1959
Neil Sedaka on piano, Darin's own chord discovery, and a wish for an ideal partner that topped Britain.
★ 5.4